Hillside Celebrates 130 Years
By Gaan Akers, LPC, NCC | March 22, 2018
Founded in January 1888, Hillside is one of Atlanta’s oldest nonprofit organizations. Since our beginning, Hillside’s mission has been to help children and families thrive.
Just as Hillside’s location and facilities have changed over time, the mission has also evolved. Today Hillside operates as a private, nonprofit organization offering a continuum of services for children and adolescents struggling with emotional and behavioral issues. Our recent campus renovation provides for a safe and comfortable place for our clients and their families to engage in treatment. Our clinical services are focused on the most effective therapies and tools available to help the children and families in our care. Our school offers a place of learning where each client can develop academic skills along with skills to manage their social and emotional needs.
Hillside’s Dining Hall
Recently renovated living space, Jo Williams Cottage
At Hillside, our clients not only receive the best psychiatric and therapeutic care, but our clients also receive quality academic programming that is tailored to their individual needs. The Hillside Conant School, accredited by AdvancED, is a place of encouragement and enthusiasm. Our 21st Century classrooms are equipped with specialized
media teaching tools and staffed with qualified and certified teachers who understand that our work with the clients goes beyond academic achievement to encompass social and emotional wellness. DBT concepts and language are incorporated into our 
daily classroom instructions and activities. Horticulture therapy and Recreational therapy, which encompasses ample physical activities as well as expressive art, are essential parts of our clients’ weekly schedules.
Thanks to generous grants from the Jesse Parker Williams Foundation in 2005, we have been able to train our staff in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), making Hillside one of the first treatment facilities to implement DBT with adolescents in a residential setting. Since 2005, all of Hillside’s clinicians have been intensively trained in DBT and continue to receive additional advanced training in order to remain at the cutting edge of the best clinical practices.
Hillside’s leadership is committed to being an excellent psychiatric residential treatment facility that is accessible to families and clients. We started to work with insurance in 2011 and are committed to staying in network with most major insurance company in order to remain accessible to and lessen the financial burden for families. We have expanded our continuum over the years to now offer Partial Hospitalization, Community based Intensive In-Home Therapy, as well as outpatient DBT Clinic.
Hillside’s Vice President of Clinical Services, Lori Hogeman, and Dr. Marsha Linehan, Ph.D., the developer of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), at an advanced DBT training.
In 2018, we are looking forward to becoming the first adolescent residential treatment program certified by the DBT-Linehan board of Certification in the Southeast. We have the first DBT-Linehan Board of Certification certified clinician in the state of Georgia on our treatment team and other clinicians in our program are currently in the certification process. Everyone on Hillside’s campus has been trained in DBT, making our campus truly an immersive DBT program.
